11 Solid Tips to Increase Google Crawl Rate Of Your Website

Site crawling is an important aspect of SEO and if bots can’t crawl your site effectively, you will notice many important pages are not indexed in Google or other search engines. A site with proper navigation helps in deep crawling and indexing of your site. Especially, for a news site it’s important that Search engine bots should be indexing your site within minutes of publishing and that will happen when bots can crawl site ASAP you publish something.

There are many things which we can do to increase the effective site crawl rate and get faster indexing. Search engines use spiders and bots to crawl your website for indexing and ranking. Your site can only be included in search engine results pages (SERP’s) if it is in the search engine’s index. Otherwise, customers will have to type in your URL to get to your site. Hence you must have a good and proper crawling rate of your website or blog to succeed. Here I’m sharing some of the effective ways to increase site crawl rate and increase visibility in popular search engines.

Simple and Effective tips to Increase Site Crawl Rate

As I mentioned you can do many things to help search engine bots find your site and crawl them. Before I get into technical aspect of crawling, in simple words: Search engine bots follow links to crawl a new link and one easy way to get search engine bots index quickly, get your site link on popular sites by commenting, guest posting.

If not, there are many other things we can do from our end like Site pinging, Sitemap submission and controlling crawling rate by using Robots.txt. I will be talking about few of these methods which will help you to increase Google crawl rate and get bots crawl your site faster and better way.

Content is by far the most important criteria for search engines. Sites that update their content on a regular basis are more likely to get crawled more frequently. You can provide fresh content through a blog that is on your site. This is simpler than trying to add web pages or constantly changing your page content. Static sites are crawled less often than those that provide new content.

Many sites provide daily content updates. Blogs are the easiest and most affordable way to produce new content on a regular basis. But you can also add new videos or audio streams to your site. It is recommended that you provide fresh content at least three times each week to improve your crawl rate. Here is little dirty trick for static sites, you can add a Twitter search widget or your twitter profile status widget if it’s very effective. This way, at least a part of your site is constantly updating and will be helpful.

2 . Server with Good Uptime

Host your blog on a reliable server with good uptime. Nobody wants Google bots to visit their blog during downtime. In fact, if your site is down for long, Google crawlers will set their crawling rate accordingly and you will find it harder to get your new content indexed faster. There are many Good hosting sites which offers 99%+ uptime and you can look at them at suggested WebHosting page.

3. Create Sitemaps

Sitemap submission is one of the first few things which you can do to make your site discover fast by search engine bots. In WordPress you can use Google XML sitemap plugin to generate dynamic sitemap and submit it to Webmaster tool.

Copied content decreases crawl rates. Search engines can easily pick up on duplicate content. This can result in less of your site being crawled. It can also result in the search engine banning your site or lowering your ranking. You should provide fresh and relevant content. Content can be anything from blog postings to videos. There are many ways to optimize your content for search engines. Using those tactics can also improve your crawl rate. It is a good idea to verify you have no duplicate content on your site. Duplicate content can be between pages or between websites. There are free content duplication resources available online you can use to authenticate your site content.

5. Reduce your site Loading Time

Mind your page load time, Note that the crawl works on a budget– if it spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDFs, there will be no time left to visit your other pages.

There is no point letting search engine bots crawling useless pages like admin pages, back-end folders as we don’t index them in Google and so there is no point letting them crawl such part of site. A Simple editing on Robots.txt will help you to stop bots from crawling such useless part of your site. You can learn more about Robots.txt for WordPress below:

Now You can also monitor and optimize Google Crawl rate using Google Webmaster Tools. Just go to the crawl stats there and analyze. You can manually set your Google crawl rate and increase it to faster as given below. Though I would suggest use it with caution and use it only when you are actually facing issues with bots not crawling your site effectively. You can read more about changing Google crawl rate here.

8. Use Ping services:

Pinging is a great way to show your site presence and let bots know when your site content is updated. There are many manual ping services like Pingomatic and in WordPress you can manually add more ping services to ping many search engine bots. You can find such a list at WordPress ping list post.

9. Submit your site to online Directories like DMoz etc.

Directories are proved to be very beneficial in driving traffic from search engines in large amount. Since Technoarti and DMoz are considered as authoritative & active directories, bots will come to your site by following your site listing pages on such directories.

Interlinking not only helps you to pass link juice but also help search engine bots to crawl deep pages of your site. When you write a new post, go back to related old posts and add a link to your new post there. This will no directly help in increasing Google crawl rate but will help bots to effectively crawl deep pages on your site.

Crawlers are unable to read images directly. If you use images, be sure to use alt tags to provide a description that search engines can index. Images are included in search results but only if they are properly optimized. You an learn about Image optimization for SEO here and you should also consider installing Google image sitemap plugin and submit it to Google. This will help bots to find all your images and you can expect decent amount of traffic from search engine bots, if you have taken care of image alt tag properly.

Well, these are few tips that I can think of which will help you to increase site crawl rate and get better indexing in Google or other search engine. A last tip which I would like to add here is, add your sitemap link in the footer of your site. This will help bots to find your sitemap page quickly and they can crawl and index deep pages of your site from sitemap.

Do let us know if you are following any other method to increase Google crawl rate of your site? If you find this post useful, don’t forget to tweet and share it on Facebook.

Subscribe on Youtube

Karan is the founder and chief CEO of Blogging Ways. He is a Professional Blogger, SEO, Web Developer, Internet Marketer and Computer Expert as well. During his leisure time, he loves to write what he knows well at BW.

I like the way you had given the message regarding the crawl rate..but i would like to know how many times can i update a post ? Will be there any issues if a edit an published article to add links to the fresh articles?

I am impressed with your method to increase the index ratio as well as the fresh factors of a website. I think another trick that you can use is using recent comment or recent post widget to make all of website content change frequently

what If I just make a single web page, paste every single web page URL inside my website into that one web page, then submit that one web page URL to Google? Will Goggle bots automatically index every URL I pasted inside my new web page?

I had all images hosted on external server.. Now I upload all images on my server and I had moved all old images on my server too..
Problem is that from last 2 weeks when I started to do that, none of images hosted on my server are indexed(pages are)

Hi sir,
really a helpful post. Some of the thinks that mentioned above are known to me.But I got more procedures and tricks from this post which are new to me.I will definitely try to do apply these on my blog.

@Chyardi
I agree…Getting inside DMOZ is tough, and not sure what all criteria they actually look before accepting any website. They should come up with paid solution for small businesses, as DMOZ is still seen as a standard directory.

If sites like DMOZ will come up with paid solutions then they will be flooded with Spam and Big Players. Right now small businesses with good content sites have probability to get into DMOZ. If DMOZ gets paid they will not get place in DMOZ too.

Yes Nikhil, Improved Crawl rate can also Increase web traffic as well. For ex- If you have to post some latest news you will get done by now and your post will rank higher and clicked by many users instead of waiting your post to get listed on Google search later on.

Getting indexed fast doesn’t mean that is going to rank for it. However, there is another way of manually indexing your pages. Go to webmaster tools then fetch your page as google and click on submit to index. Your post will show in google within a few seconds.

i do all the things you have mentioned above but still i found out that my site was last crawled on july 26….is there any way we can force google into crawling our site,,,and the option of fetch as google bot,,does it make google to crawl the site

Read the whole of it.
Retweeted it, LIKE-d it on facebook and shared it on Google plus because it contains lots of useful information.
Written in an extremely understandable language (making it easier for a person with a non technical base like me to understand it), it would benefit any new blogger immensely.
Could you suggest me a few good directories for submission in the health niche`?